48 chapter
what allopathy has established as a normative style of producing medication.
Kerala’s large pharmaceutical manufacturer Arya Vaidya Sala started in 1902
as an attempt to standardize and legitimize ayurvedic pharmaceutical practices
following the model of biomedical practices (Habib and Raina 2005: 75), and
ayurvedic reseachers at a plant pharmacognosy center in Trivandrum are today
working to further standardize ayurvedic medicines by developing ways to
regulate the quantity of active ingredients in ayurvedic products.
Th e creation of tailor-made medications may be linked to the tendency in
ayurveda to approach treatment not in terms of disease categories but in terms
of specifi c patients with specifi c symptoms of distress. Although ayurvedic
physicians use disease categories, they also employ a conceptual continuum
that is informed by dosas, among other things, to explain particular constella-
tions of symptoms in individual patients. For example, a person who visits an
ayurvedic physician with complaints about stomach cramps and headache will
not necessarily be identifi ed as having a particular disease indicated by these
symptoms. Instead he may be seen as a person with stomach cramps and head-
ache, and those particular symptoms (and the excess or insuffi ciency of dosas
that underlies them) will be treated. Th is orientation to treating individuals
with symptoms may help explain the attention to the aesthetic quality of the
process of treatment in ayurveda. Perhaps a greater emphasis on destroying
pathogens (and the often-cited war metaphors that are invoked in this eff ort)
enables allopathic treatments to focus more intently on the ideal of curing and
employ more abrasive treatments—as will be discussed further in Chapter 5.
It should also be mentioned that ayurveda is not confi ned to South Asia, but
has emerged in various parts of the world. Th ere are ayurvedic healing centers in
major U.S. and European cities, and ayurvedic medicines are sold in health food
stores and pharmacies in many other countries. In the United States, Deepak
Chopra has brought his version of ayurveda to popular audiences through the
media, and the Body Shop as well as other body and skin care manufacturers fea-
ture products that claim to be ayurvedic. At an ayurvedic center in New Mexico,
meanwhile, ayurvedic panchakarma therapy, which is administered to patients
at the Government Ayurveda Mental Hospital in Kerala, is marketed as a spa
treatment to New Age American consumers (Selby 2005: 121). Th e marketing
of ayurveda abroad, and to a great degree in India as well, emphasizes holism,
balance, nonviolence, use of natural products and vegetarianism. Zimmermann
has described this trend as a commodifi cation of ayurveda that has developed in
relation to biomedicine due to “the current quest for gentleness in the competi-
tive marketplace of alternative medical care” (1992: 218). Th us, the attention to
the pleasantness of the process of treatment in ayurveda may have been shaped
by competition with biomedicine and other therapeutic systems.